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You mean with militants being killed, arrested, and/or fined? I can think of better endings. You know things aren't ideal when the cherry picked examples still

You mean with militants being killed, arrested, and/or fined? I can think of better endings. You know things aren't ideal when the cherry picked examples still ended with death and prison without (obvious) lasting changes. Other cherry picked examples ended way worse [0]. These were extremely localized protests in terms of people involved and goals. How would it work out on a national scale involving multiple parties and different goals on different scales? The article we're commenting on is about mass surveillance, how would a protest of 1+ million armed people look like, and how would the authorities treat it? As a protest or as an attempt to overthrow the government? And what happens when some of those people are actually pro-government and they also have guns? Any major civil unrest is all but guaranteed to not end well (in general) because simply organizing it might be treated as a crime. And the fight is unlikely to be just 2 sided, "the people" vs. the government. If you have to hang on to your guns because that's the only sure way to effect change then something somewhere went terribly wrong. And reality is that it was much easier to very slowly erode the freedom and not one single change was severe enough to trigger unrest on more than localized issues that only affected one tiny group of people. By the time people look back and realize what they had and lost, even guns won't help. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege

dredmorbius 7y ago
The point is that the State Blinked. It happens. For numerous reasons. Social resistance: the Prohibition, Civil Rights, and AntiWar (Vietnam) movements in the US, India's liberation movement, pro-democracy protests in South Korea during the 1980s, anti-globalism and 99% resistance movements in the 1990s and 2000s, Black Lives Matter and (to a point) the Alt-Right and militia protests (the latter being very prominantly armed). The state, and power generally, gives up nothing without a fight. But a sufficiently credible threat will make it at least blink, particularly if there isn't a single central point that can be identified to remove a threat. Or if the power balance as a whole shifts. While most of my examples don't rise to the level of direct overthrow, they do very much represent an armed resistance to central government authority. And yes, that's gone quite poorly for the opposition in many, almost certainly most cases. But not all. The exceptions might prove illuminating.

dredmorbius 7y ago

The point is that the State Blinked. It happens. For numerous reasons. Social resistance: the Prohibition, Civil Rights, and AntiWar (Vietnam) movements in the US, India's liberation movement, pro-democracy protests in South Korea during the 1980s, anti-globalism and 99% resistance movements in the 1990s and 2000s, Black Lives Matter and (to a point) the Alt-Right and militia protests (the latter being very prominantly armed). The state, and power generally, gives up nothing without a fight. But a sufficiently credible threat will make it at least blink, particularly if there isn't a single central point that can be identified to remove a threat. Or if the power balance as a whole shifts. While most of my examples don't rise to the level of direct overthrow, they do very much represent an armed resistance to central government authority. And yes, that's gone quite poorly for the opposition in many, almost certainly most cases. But not all. The exceptions might prove illuminating.